XXII STARVING HIPPOPOTAMI 475 



swimming about, each with a very heavily-shafted 

 assegai sticking in his back ; these assegais are 

 plunged into them at night when the starving beasts 

 come near the fences seeking for a means of exit 

 from their horrible prison. Besides these ten living 

 hippopotami, two dead ones were being cut up in a 

 corner of the pool, and many more must have already 

 succumbed to hunger and assegai wounds, for all 

 round the pool festoons of meat were hanging upon 

 poles to dry, and besides this, there were at least a 

 hundred natives, men, women, and children, encamped 

 round about, all of whom were living upon nothing 

 but hippopotamus meat. 



As far as I could make out, these poor animals 

 had been enclosed for about three weeks, and it was 

 self-evident that the survivors were all but played out, 

 for it must be remembered that as the Umniati here 

 runs over either sand or stone, there is no vegetation 

 whatever in the bed of the river, and therefore, as 

 the natives remarked, the poor brutes had nothing 

 but water with which to sustain life. Judging by 

 the amount of meat we saw drying, I calculated 

 that when the remaining ten hippopotami had died 

 or been killed, not less than twenty of these animals 

 would have been destroyed at one fell swoop. 

 Although this mode of circumventing and killing 

 game must be most revolting to all men with any 

 humane or sportsmanlike feeling about them, yet, 

 after all, the natives can scarcely be blamed tor 

 employing the only means in their power of obtaining 

 a supply of animal food ; for they have no firearms, 

 and trust entirely to pitfalls, and traps of the above 

 description, for killing large game ; at any rate, 

 when they do kill anything, nothing is wasted, and 

 is it not too much ito say that out of these twenty 



